McCain Has a Good Week For Once

-The economy did not dominate any news cycles this week.

-He did reasonably well in the last debate.

-Sarah Palin continues to rock the base with thousands of supporters.

-He makes up with David Letterman

-Obama and McCain have a light hearted moment at the Al Smith dinner.

-And Obama knocked on the door of the wrong plumber and had it blow up in his face. Youtube gone viral, which blew into the debate, which then fed the news cycle for the next few days. Joe the Plumber is now a household name, for good or ill. McCain doesn't seem to mind.

Ah, election years in the internet age. A sight to behold.

The most important of these factors is probably that the economy is receding since it is the single best issue for Obama. As the focus slowly goes off the economy and a crashing market. McCain's poll numbers should improve. And they have.

RCP has McCain closing the gap very slowly with Obama currently at 6.9 but as high as 8 this week. it's actually a little better than that since we have an outlier of 14 points from CBS News that is clearly way off but is dragging the polls a little down.

Among the trackers, Rasmussen is at Obama +4 down from +8 earlier this week.

IBD started a new one with a slight lead to Obama but is corroborating him at +5 as well.

Battleground also had a +9 moving to a +4 today.

And the one that has everyone talking is the Gallup traditional model at Obama +2 down from +7 on Tuesday. Now Gallup also has an expanded likely voter model that has obama at +6, for those who believe in a huge youth turnout. So keep that one in mind.

But in all of these, the trend appears to be McCain's friend right now.